Dark Side of the Sun
by NeonWorld
Summary: The sun is bright, but he does not live under it's warmth. His sun is black obsidian that washes him white. All the better to see the stains. Character Death, light, brotherly ItaSasu, angst. Fifteen years old and a killer.


**Neon: **This is actually a post of mine from an RPG board I belong to. I am Sasuke, obviously. If this is a little vague on what is happening, that's only because the other participant's posts are missing. D: I hope you still enjoy, even though it's like this.

Pairings: Brotherly ItaSasu, if you squint.

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Sasuke's sharp ears pricked at the tinkling shatter of glass, his senses blazing into overdrive. Quickly picking up the aura of his former teacher, the younger stilled the automatic reaction to attack. This was his test. He would not deny that he had killed Iruka.

Hasty footsteps made their way to him, and he was minutely shocked when Kakashi tossed him aside, instead of trying to capture him. The push was sloppy, and though forceful, it was terribly easy for Sasuke to regain his footing and cushion himself with his arms against the nearest tree. His movements were graceful and relaxed, his fingers curling to conform to the rough bark as he watched Kakashi look over his kill.

When Kakashi had whipped around, cursing Sasuke's very namesake to the high heavens, the dark haired boy merely pinpointed his dull gaze to the man, looking right through him. Sasuke did not hate Kakashi. Quite the contrary, Sasuke still held the man in respect.

But Kakashi hated him. There was poison in that ever calm, joking voice.

Naruto was bitter and hated him as well. Sakura was too emotional to know what she felt, but her morals inevitably pushed her away from Sasuke, such a person as he had become. He had spent almost his entire life in Konoha, and he had no friends other than the people that made up the former Team Seven. Everyone else saw what they were supposed to see, as much as they wanted to believe.

Sasuke was a caged animal.

In school, he was something to be seen, but not touched. Spoken about, but not spoken to. Some thought this treatment to be akin to that of a deity, but Sasuke wasn't like that.

Gods were not pointed at and whispered about behind childish hands, high, hushed voices ringing and mingling with the scratching of pencils and lectures of the class teacher.

'_Hey, isn't that an Uchiha?'_

'_My dad says that they--'_

'_Don't get him angry, I heard they can--'_

'_With those eyes? Yeah--'_

'_He'll fry your brain or something, man, don't go over there. You can borrow my crayons.'_

'_And he's like, the clan head's son, yeah?'_

All those years back, Sasuke would just tighten his grip on his pencil and concentrate doubly on the notes about the Doppler effect and muffling your movements effectively.

Then Itachi left.

Itachi took responsibility for the murders.

Not for Sasuke's life, though. Not his little brother's heart.

Sasuke would do the same for this murder. His brother always knew best.

'_That Uchiha, he's been out of class a lot, hey?'_

'_Probably just getting home trained-- public ninja school isn't good enough for him, I bet.'_

Slowly, Sasuke would toe off his sandals, first the right and then the left, and draw his knees to his chest, small toes curling over the edge of his hard, plastic seat. The kind of seat that was designed to keep students at attention, but Naruto and Shikamaru always managed to fall asleep in.

'_He looks really sick though, guys. Look, all pale and stuff, like he's just had the flu.'_

'_Ha! He's supposed to look like that. My mom said that all the really old clans are pale with dark hair and eyes. It's a mark of… knob…?'_

'_Nobility, you idiot. Just another way to say they're better than us.'_

With a tiny, almost scared inclination of his head, Sasuke would glance around and look at everyone else. They all had hair ranging from brown to black, and a few blondes like Naruto and Ino, all of their eyes wide and colorful. Sasuke's hair was blackblackalmost_blue _and seemed to be a lot less messy than the other boys'. His eyes were pitch black and almond shaped, slightly narrower and gently slanted. He wanted to be the same.

_He didn't want to see Itachi every time he saw his reflection._

He would stare at his own little hands, wrapped around his legs, and examine closely his pale fingers. Why could he not be brash and rough and laugh raucously like the other boys in his class? Why did he have fine boned features, instead of a face like a boy used to playing and having fun in dirt and singing '_I'm the king of the castle--'_

'_Because children like that are dirty rascals,' _father had once told him. You don't want to be like those _common _people, do you Sasuke?

Awfully easy for you to say, dearest father, with your chestnut hair and bronzed skin, he would think to himself in front of his not-there father. Sasuke could imagine his father singing in a childish voice, among daring children of his own age.

'_It's alright, Sasuke. You are better than those other children anyway, right? You have the best marks in class, so you've showed them.' _Itachi would say, a tiger that was free to roam about his cage of prejudiced ridicule, allowed to snap at offending hands that hid spiteful remarks, just because he was _Itachi._

Sasuke's heart would swell, elated, and he'd be able to face another day working his hardest to do his best. Maybe if he did better, the other children would like him…

But that wouldn't happen any longer. The only remnants of his mother and father in their house were bloody splatters of black-crimson that simply refused to come out of the _white white _tatami. Itachi had gone, and every word that Sasuke could recall his brother ever saying to him had now been tainted. Itachi lied to him.

The school bell would sound for break, shattering his spirit all over again with the stinging shards of _reality._

'_C'mon, Sasuke-kun! Let's play house!' _A squeal of a voice, an added bribery, '_It's just pretend!'_

_Just pretend…_

Like how Itachi had been. Those promises that had yet to be kept, false; those praises, lies. It was all a game, right? No harm done.

No one got hurt by Itachi's games.

Well, just Sasuke. But he isn't even important enough to kill.

The girls seeking a father for their baby dolls would eventually wilt like pretty flowers at his lack of acknowledgement, fleeing off to go bother another hapless eight year old male into their break time activities.

Sasuke would rest his forehead on his knees, fingers tightening around his legs, _noble _features blank and bleary. He couldn't allow anyone to become his friend, now. The more people hated him, the less people who would get hurt.

He had said, '_You must kill (destroy, slaughter, murder) your best friend, Sasuke…' _

Unspoken, '_Then I'll acknowledge you.'_

His child's body aching, mind and spirit set on solitude to protect his village _(and himself), _the little boy with those dark, slanted eyes got up from his seat and put on his sandals again. First the right, then the left. He snatched up his canvas satchel of dulled kunai, because you didn't get to use sharp ones until you were ten, and went outside to _pretend, _like all the other children, but entirely different once again.

Sasuke _pretended_ the fencepost was Itachi. Sasuke _pretended_ the knives were sharp. No one got hurt.

Not yet.

Inside, lying on the graffiti engraved desk, his notebook was white and unmarked.

Kakashi fell to the ground, his body crumpling like his knees were made out of so many rejected paper dolls.

Sasuke imagined them with their crooked crescents of smiles and wide, bright eyes, all holding hands as they are uplifted towards the sky on wings of wind, leaving him behind on the rocky ground.

Stuck somewhere in between the past and the present, but never the future, as Sasuke often did, but only on occasion, he stepped forward. The sound of each footfall reverberated in his mind, mixing with the joyous calls of children that never included him, and screams of those that looked _like him _with those dignified bodies and _faces, _but far less like a corpse…

Carefully, a shinobi of a near extinct species wiped the blood away from the masked man's hands, using a touch of chakra to clean up the stains of scarlet rivers and lakes that decorated the area. Even if the scene was morbid, the teenage child washed away the blood from every surface he could find, not to hide his misdeeds, but because he still respected Kakashi.

He knew what it was like to have your hands covered in the blood of precious people. Since he didn't have those eyes, though, he couldn't say if it hurt more to know you killed them, or were not strong enough to stop it from happening.

The latter was still painful to a traumatizing degree.

Sasuke knew this, so he collected the priceless liquid rubies into his _white white _hands, his skin staining just as the tatami had, so someone he forced himself to not care about didn't have to wake up to it. To _this._

The sun beat heavily upon his back, and the cool breeze gently kissed his face and tousled the wild crest of hair, the either of them as reprimanding and as stern as his father, and as fair and as kind as his mother had been. Running his cupped palms over the chunnin's flack jacket, blood disappearing from the material, and instead taking home in the boy's delicate, work hewn hands, he remembered once hearing about the people that lived just outside of the village hidden in the Sand…

They lived in huts made of adobe, the yellow-brown mud monotonous against the ground of the same shade, yet vivid in his mind's eye. The soil was poor for farming, and water was scarce, yet the natives to that land held the sun in the highest worship. Sasuke found this idiotic, as the sun was the very thing that held them bound and caged to that place, to those kinds of lives.

The same sun shone down upon everyone, but Sasuke did not live under it. His sun was black, a penetrating evil eye swathed in a mantle blemished with a deep crimson that made him nostalgic and happily nauseous. Under _that _sun, Sasuke's eyes were the clearest of whites, yet their purity was insincere and soiled. Itachi was his sun, but Sasuke was _not _like those desert people.

Those people were stuck to their way of life.

They couldn't move from it, no matter what they had the mind to try.

In his imaginary face, his brows were furrowed and lips set in a scowl, Sasuke desperately reached behind him, finding a slim sheet of metal and worn cloth, wrapping his long fingers around it and gripping it tightly. Tying the symbol of Konoha over Kakashi's stolen eye, any onlooker would have seen the blank, porcelain face of a doll _(a puppet, strings still held fast) _that simply refused to shatter.

Stayed intact, no matter how many times he turned his face towards the bright white-yellow blossom of fire and felt guilty for enjoying the warmth.

Arranging the bodies nicely, the one slowly going cold, and the other's silver hair dancing with the wind, Sasuke's mind wandered to his current sham of a home.

His favorite was the underground labyrinth, cradled deep underneath the permafrost the soil there was rich with. It was always chilling in temperature, and the ground was always dusted in a thin coating of snow, mixed with the black dirt, like gray ashes. It reminded Sasuke of cremated remains, strewn about the peaceful place. It was always so very _quiet_ there, as if even the noisiest of animals hushed themselves for fear of breaking the reverence that a wandering man might hold for the scene. Scattered about, there were dead, pallid trees, all of them slender and reaching upwards towards a pearl white sky. There was never any sun to be seen, for the overcast was a thick, foggy alabaster in the day, and the deepest smoke gray in even the darkest of nights.

In that place, Sasuke could caress the sky with his hands of the same lackluster shade, the stains _almost _nonexistent against the bright expanse of heaven.

At those times, he didn't feel quite so alone.

But this wasn't one of those times, and he was very much alone, now. He didn't want to be there when Kakashi awoke; his accomplishment of cleaning up all the blood would just seem like a cruel, twisted mockery, then.

Sasuke stood and retrieved his cloak, draping it over one forearm, and made his way steadily towards the gates of Konoha. He would sit down in front of the gates and wait for someone to find him. Right now, he did not thirst to be the same as the ground and the sky and live under no sun whatsoever.

Accepting that he was _different _was better than running. He was sick of running away.

Sasuke planned to count the scales on the cunning metal snake that wound itself around the hilt of his katana, to pass time.

It would have been a superb idea, had he not already known exactly how many there were, down to the tiny scratches and blemishes.

He kept his head bowed; unwilling to glance upon that pure sun.

That sun that was not his, that had seen much more than any one man could ever comprehend, and frankly, couldn't care less.

Sasuke's sun was entirely the same, but he did not realize it. Sasuke's sun was _his,_ and his only. He'd give up anything to hold onto that one thing, be it even his own life as the sacrificial lamb. He unwittingly held his sun in worship, even more than those dark skinned people held their untainted orb of light.

He had nothing _else _to hold onto, after all.

One day, that black sun would shine perfectly for him. That sun, beautiful dark orb that bathed his skin tatami white, complete with splashes of tainting red, the sun that sought to incinerate him from the inside out. One day.

That one day could not come quickly enough.

_.:Mister sunshine, please shine down on me:._


End file.
